High-end wealth shop hires ex-NYSE exec to lead family-enterprise advisory. Bessemer Trust has hired Bryant Seaman III to run a new business unit created to help wealthy families sort through succession planning, strategic growth alternatives, capital-raising options and other financing issues related to their businesses and private investments.

“As a private company, Bessemer Trust is keenly aware that many family-business owners appreciate having a trusted financial advisor when evaluating strategic alternatives, considering liquidity events or positioning their company for a successful transition to future generations,” says Robert Elliott, Bessemer’s senior managing director.

Before he joined Bessemer, Seaman worked for the New York Stock Exchange, where he was responsible for the big board’s dealings with non-US companies, foreign stock exchanges and non-U.S. government agencies. Before that – in reverse succession – he was managing director of investment banking at Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown, co-head of global corporate finance at Credit Suisse First Boston and a corporate and securities attorney with Sullivan & Cromwell, a law firm.

“Bryant’s extensive experience maximizing shareholder value through corporate finance advisory services, with emphasis on best practices in corporate governance, will help us further strengthen our profile among prominent families,” says Elliot.

Question of conflict

For his part, Seaman says he’s looking forward to helping Bessemer’s clients “preserve and enhance” their wealth through the firm’s new family-business advisory. “Bessemer shares the values and relationship orientation of family-owned businesses,” he says. “Our objective will be to develop and execute the optimal corporate finance strategy for our clients in the context of each family’s unique circumstances.”

Bessemer isn’t the only wealth advisory to make family-business consulting a core offering. Early this year Lowenhaupt & Chasnoff, a St. Louis, Mo.-based custom-service provider to ultra-high-net-worth families, hired veteran private-equity specialist Joseph Rechter to help clients assess alternatives for their businesses, especially during periods of transition.

“We know that families need help with their businesses,” says Charles Lowenhaupt, Lowenhaupt & Chasnoff’s managing member. “So, if your goal is to serve families, something like this makes strategic sense.”

Or it does, adds Lowenhaupt, if there are no transaction fees involved. He says Rechter's job is to evaluate “how the family business works in the [familiy's] overall wealth fabric,” in terms especially of its supporting the family's goals, and then to offer the family unbiased advice when and as necessary.

Family-business consulting is part of the basic service package at Lowenhaupt & Chasnoff, and the firm charges no extra fees for it – even if its assessment results in a transaction that Lowenhaupt & Chasnoff helps to facilitate. “If [a firm] charges transaction fees, it’s hard to argue that [it’s] truly non-conflicted,” says Lowenhaupt.

In fact, Bessemer charges no additional fees for family-business consulting, nor does it levy transaction fees of any kind related to any action a family might take as a result of its advice, says a spokesman for the firm.

That said, Bessemer would charge an additional fee “if the client asks for extensive advice in relation to a transaction,” according to the spokesman. “But that would only be in extraordinary circumstances, where the client is asking for really extensive support, and anyway it would be purely an advisory fee.”

Lowenhaupt says his firm charges “a board fee or advisory fee” in cases where Rechter is asked to serve on the board of a company in which one of its client-families is an investor.

New York-based Bessemer oversees about $43 billion in assets for approximately 1,800 “relationships.” –FWR

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